NVIDIA Quadro K4000 in Review

The NVIDIA Quadro K4000 is a new high performance graphics card
fromNVIDIA. It retails for around $800 USD making it a freaking
steal! (More on exactly why later.) For many real-world
applications you get performance very close to its bigger brother
the NVIDIA Quadro K5000, but for less than half the price.
(Performance wise it's approximately akin to a Quadro 5000 Fermi,
but sleeker and more power efficient utilizing the new Kepler
core.)

The NVIDIA Quadro K4000 I received just prior to testing. Yes, it
also looked like this after testing. These Kepler cards run pretty
cool.

Admittedly the Quadro 4000 was slower than its bigger brother in
every single test I ran however for 3D content creation software
like Maya, the relative real-world performance difference for all
but the densest of scenes was negligible. (CUDA intensive tasks,
offline hardware rendering and extremely heavy textures are the
exception.) If you're looking for a great performing Quadro card
but can't drop $1800-$2000 for a Quadro K5000, the Quadro K4000is a
viable option. Well, it's more than viable - it's a great
option! First, a little about quadro in general.

The Quadro product lineup is targeted toward professional
Workstation graphics and extremely high resolution multi-device
displays. If your daily routine involves Maya, SolidWorks, CATIA,
AutoCad, medical imaging, gas, etc with millions of polygons,
gigabytes of textures - a Quadro card makes life easier. (And in
some cases possible at all.) For Adobe users, including Photoshop
CS6 and many other programs in the CS6 lineup, they can also
benefit from the improved compute performance of the NVIDIA Quadro
K4000 as can users of many high end compositing applications such
as Nuke and Nukex by The Foundry.

Unlike its bigger brother, the Quadro K5000, the smaller Quadro
K4000 is a single slot card. The video outs are 2x Display Port
connectors and one DVI-I connector. The DVI-D connector, as is
visible on the Quadro K5000, is now gone. On the next generation of
Quadro cards I wouldn't be surprised of all DVI connectors vanished
in favor of Display Port:

Quadro K4000 on top, Quadro K5000 on bottom.

Even compared to its bigger brother, the smaller K4000 still
boasts some pretty impressive specs:

Quadro K4000 vs. Quadro K5000 specs

GPU Spec

Quadro K4000

Quadro K5000

CUDA Cores

768

1,536

Gigaflops (single precision)

1246

2,100

Memory

3.0 GB

4.0 GB

Memory Bandwidth (GB/s)

134 GB/s

173 GB/s

Max Power Consumption

80 watts

122 watts

Max supported displays

4

4

ECC

no

yes

OpenGL Version

4.3

4.3

Slots Occupied

1

2

Power Efficiency

Just like its bigger brother, the Quadro K4000 also employs the
new Kepler core. The payoff is greater thermal efficiency over the
previous Fermi core designs. Not surprisingly the Quadro K4000 is a
touch more efficient than its faster, bigger brother the Quadro
K5000. Both of which are considerably more efficient than cards
from the preceding Fermi generation:

The result is more number crunching awesome and less waste heat.
I experienced a case temperature drop of about 10 degrees over the
Fermi cores. In a well vented case, the heat sink shroud of the
card itself runs at around 44 Celsius (112 Fahrenheit). This is an
improvement over the Fermi core cards that regularly hit 54 Celsius
(130 Fahrenheit). That's heatsink shroud temperature not core
temperature!

Synthetic Benchmarks

I benchmarked the Quadro K4000 in SPECviewperf® 11:

I did an average of 3 test iterations. For those more familiar
with theGeForce lineup, SPECviewperf® is the workstation analog of
3DMark. It'spretty much the industry standard benchmark for
workstation graphics cards. One must keep in mind however,
SPECviewperf® 11 is a synthetic benchmark. The reported
performance numbers will vary from one machine to another even with
identical graphics cards. This is not unexpected. The best test of
performance is with a real-world data that the end-user will
actually be working with.

First my SPECviewperf® 11 results:

These are somewhat lower than the official NVIDIA results (as my
machine is not the same behemoth as theirs) but they are still
surprisingly good. In fact, as we'll see in a moment these results
are precisely why this card is such a great deal. First, the specs
of the test machine I used for the results displayed above, are
shown below:

My test machine specs

Spec

Value

CPU

AMD Phenom II x4 @ 3,200 MHz

Memory

12,288 MB DDR3 @ 800 Mhz

OS

Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit.

GPU

NVIDIA Quadro K4000

So why are these results so good? Because look how the card
stacks up (theK4000 is pink in the graph
below):

So you basically get a Quadro 5000 (fermi) for half the price
and much greater performance per watt. The card runs cooler but
still delivers about the same performance as its previous
generation bigger brother. Still, it does loose out to its current
generation bigger brother the Quadro K5000 (kepler) in ever single
test, as expected.

You can also see the GeForce GTX 480 (fermi) for comparison.
This is why a Quadro card is so critical to high performance in
engineering, medical, gas, geospatial, and digital content creation
applications. Just look at theMAYA-03 result. While this doesn't
directly translate to real-world performance it does provide
insight.

Quadro vs. GeForce

I get asked this all the time! I always get great feedback for
my Quadro reviews. (Thanks guys!) The questions are generally the
same. People wonder if they really need, or could benefit from, a
Quadro card. They ask questions like:

"Are they [Quadro cards] really that much faster [than
GeForce]?"

"Can you also play games on a Quadro card?"

Unfortunately the real answer isn't as simple as 'yes' or 'no'.
While you can play games on a Quadro card, and they do
generally perform very well, that's not the whole story. I know
what you're thinking though:

"Who cares, does it work?!"

Yes, but keep reading: Your wallet should care in two ways.
First, for pure gaming you will get more bang-for-buck out of a
GeForce card - A lot more. This can save you some significant
mad-money, like $1500-2000. Add that to your Vegas jar. While
saving money always sounds great, there's more to think
about...

The Quadro lineup is geared toward graphics
professionals, engineers, medical imaging, geospatial, or
anyone who needs very heavy computational performance. By
"heavy" we're not talking photographs and web graphics.
Think more along the lines of a 3D model that accurately describes
every thread of every bolt in your whole damn car - and all the
other parts. Think programs likeAutodesk Maya, The Foundry's Nuke
and Nukex, Catia, SolidWorks. For certain video encoders that don't
already make use of onboard NVENC (the on-card dedicated hardware
encoder for H.264 video) the added CUDA cores of a Quadro can
really help. In these cases a Quadro can save you
significant dough! We're talking reduced production times
here where $2000 is peanuts.

I can attest that for certain programs, including Autodesk Maya,
there is an immense difference in real-world performance between a
Quadro and a GeForcecard. This is in-viewport performance where I
can pan and dolly 1,000 square miles of detailed terrain without
breaking a sweat. (The software rendering performance i.e.
mentalray is identical.) When the system requirements say
"Requires professional graphics card," they mean it!

So does that make Quadro cards faster at gaming? Surprisingly
no. They'll be on-par with an equivalent GeForce card, sometimes a
touch slower sometimes faster but by no significant margin.
Remember, game engines are written with GeForce in mind.
Technically, you can play games with a Quadro with pretty-settings
cranked up on your workstation, but it's not nirvana.

Just for fun (and these results are not official as 3D Mark 11
is largely unaware of Quadro cards) here's the results of running
3D Mark 11 on theQuadro K4000 vs. a GeForce GTX 480 (Fermi):

Score

Quadro K4000

GeForce GTX 480

graphics score

3878

5741

physics score

5879

5651

combined score

3487

5542

As you can see for gaming GeForce is the way to go. However for
digital content creation and engineering apps, don't forget that
embarrassing SPECviewperf®11 result I showed earlier where the
Quadro sends the GeForce packing. Pick the right tool for the
job!

Final Thoughts

The Quadro K4000 really is a great card and retails for around
$800 USD. For the price/performance it delivers relative to its
siblings, that makes it asteal. If I was a freelance
artist looking to spend money out of my own pocket, this is
probably be the card I'd buy.

The only negative point I could find was the paintFX brush
outline in Autodesk Maya 2013 didn't follow the cursor. That, and
there was a flicker when you pan the camera in a paintFX panel.
Maya paintFX is pretty well known for being finicky when it comes
to GPUs. I wouldn't be surprised if this gets fixed with a future
driver update. Fortunately, it was only a minor annoyance and not
enough to affect workflow. Still, bang-for-buck the Quadro K4000 is
five stars all the way!

You can find out more about these cards at the NVIDIA website,
as well as more about the performance test suite SPECviewperf® 11
at the following links:

All supporting images are copyright, and
cannot be
copied, printed, or reproduced in any manner without written
permission

Kurt Foster (Modulok) falls somewhere between
programmer and visual effects artist. When not sifting through
technical manuals, he takes on freelance roles in both programming
and visual effects, attempting to create a marriage of technical
knowledge with artistic talent. He can be seen helping out on the
Renderosity Maya forum, when time permits.

May 6, 2013

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